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Tuesday, 2 May 2017

THE JANE AUSTEN PROJECT: SIX QUESTIONS FOR AUTHOR KATHLEEN FLYNN

Time travel and Jane Austen. It sounds
like the perfect match for an intriguing story. How did you come to write The
Jane Austen Project?

Thanks for your kind words, Maria Grazia! I hope people will
find it so. Although it took a long time
to write this book, the idea came to me in a flash. One night lying awake I started
thinking about Jane Austen: how sad it was that she died so comparatively
young, and how unfortunate for scholars that the majority of her letters were
destroyed. What a genius she was, stuck
in a time and place with little use for intelligent women, and how frustrating that
must have been for her. But what was she
really like? I found mself wondering. If
only we could build a time machine, and go back and get some answers!

One piece of advice I’ve taken to heart is that you should
write the sort of book you want to read, and I’ve always been happiest with books with fantastical elements, yet grounded
in reality, whether historical, mythological or emotional. I am thinking of
novels like “The Doomsday Book,” or “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell” or “The
Golem and the Jinni.” Time travel is a crazy idea, but it seemed like a powerful
metaphor about being human. We are all time travelers, but usually it’s a
one-way trip.

Before we focus on Jane Austen as a
character in your book, could you tell us something more about Liam and Rachel,
your time travellers who are lucky enough to meet her?

I’ve always seen Rachel and Liam like characters in one of
those screwball comedies from the 1930s – mismatched and sparring, yet with
complementary strengths, eventually finding their way to respect and affection.
Rachel is a physician, with a love of adventure and of Jane Austen. She’s competent
and feisty, not quite prepared for how limiting
it is to be a woman in 1815. Because the story is told in Rachel’s
first-person, we see Liam only as Rachel does, and he’s not someone who likes
to talk about himself. So part of the story is the unfolding of Liam’s
character to Rachel and to the reader. He is an academic who used to be an
actor, and despite his reserved nature he’s good at assuming a part. It’s useful
in the mission, but it starts to drive Rachel crazy – she wants to know who he
“really” is. But how do we ever know that? What does it mean, to know another
person, when it is hard even to know ourselves?

You and Jane Austen. What was your first
encounter with her work?

I first read “Pride and Prejudice” when I was about 12, not
knowing anything about it except that it was famous, and immediately loved it.
I still have that tattered paperback – a cheap Cardinal edition from 1952, original
price 35 cents, which I found in a bookshelf of my grandmother’s house and
appropriated, underlining the funny passages. It’s crumbling now and I don’t
read it, but I keep it around.

Do you have a favourite Austen novel?
What about your favourite hero/heroine?

Each one has its special delights. I love how gleefully
metafictional “Northanger Abbey” is. I love the clever way Austen misdirectsthe reader in “Emma,” the doubleness of
“Sense and Sensibility,” how “Mansfield Park” refuses us easy answers, the
satisfying manner that Anne is finally rewarded in “Persusasion.” I love “Pride
and Prejudice” for its wit and its heart. Each time I reread any of them I find
something new.

I love all Austen’s heroes (even Edmund Bertram) but I think
Henry Tilney would be the one to spend a lifetime with, because he would make
me laugh. Of all the heroines, Marianne might
be my favorite, maybe because she seems the least suited for life in the early
19th century. She’s so unabashedly intelligent, so fierce, so affectionate. I
could imagine her living in the dorm with me in college – she’d be the one
bringing unsuitable men home and having noisy sex, but also winning literary
prizes and acting in an experimental theaterical troupe and volunteering at a
soup kitchen. You’d think she was really annoying, until you got to know her
heart.

How difficult was it for you to write Jane Austen as a character,
especially in the last years of her life?

In some ways Jane Austen is such a mystery, but in others
she’s so accessible. In the letters, especially, you almost feel in her presence,
the quick play of her mind, the delight she takes in mundane things --- she spends a surprising amount of time in her
letters to Cassandra talking about things like housekeeping and fashion. The
danger is that she is so famous that everyone has an opinion about what she
should be like, and in creating her as a fictional character you are bound to
disapppoint someone. The last years of her life seem particuarly interesting
and poignant, and I knew even in the early stages of imagining a time-travel
voyage to find her that we would meet older Jane. In 1815 she has finally come
into herself; she is acknowledged as the writer she long knew herself to be. I
imagine her as happy and fulfilled, finally with a little money to call her
own, at the height of her powers. The real artistic license I took was that she
would probably not warm up so easily to some rich new friends of her brother’s:
the evidence suggests that she was guarded with people who were not family or
very old friends. That would have made the story much less interesting, though.

If you could travel back to the
Regency like the protagonists of your
novel

-what would you like to do or see

-what would you miss the most from your
life?

I’d love to just walk around looking at the shops and the people and the
life – London, on a Sunday afternoon.
I’ve done this so many times in my imagination that it would be interesting to
see what I got wrong or right. I’d also enjoy traveling by post-chaise, seeing
the landscape before the railways and later highways transformed it. Maybe I
could go for a seaside vacation, and use a bathing machine. And how fascinating
it would be to go to the theater -- imagine seeing Shakespeare filtered through
the imagination of the people of 1815! I’m curious, too, about the how the food
would taste. I imagine it would in some
cases be much better – fresh and local –
and other times much worse, either starting to go bad, or adulterated,
something that apparently happened a lot, in the absence of any food-safety
regulations.

What I would miss most is easy: the freedom and rights that
women enjoy today compared to then. I would also miss running water, tampons
and antibiotics.

That's all Kathleen. Thank you so much for being my guest and good luck with the release of your book.

Thank you so much for these questions! They were fun to
think about. And thank you for asking me to be on your wonderful blog!

About The Jane Austen Project

Perfect for fans of Jane Austen, this engrossing debut novel offers an
unusual twist on the legacy of one of the world's most celebrated and beloved
authors: two researchers from the future are sent back in time to meet Jane and
recover a suspected unpublished novel.

London, 1815: Two travelers—Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane—arrive in a field in
rural England, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. Turned away at a
nearby inn, they are forced to travel by coach all night to London. They are
not what they seem, but rather colleagues who have come back in time from a
technologically advanced future, posing as wealthy West Indies planters—a
doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren’t the first team
from the future to “go back,” their mission is by far the most audacious: meet,
befriend, and steal from Jane Austen herself.

Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for
Special Topics in Physics, disaster-relief doctor Rachel and
actor-turned-scholar Liam have little in common besides the extraordinary
circumstances they find themselves in. Circumstances that call for Rachel to
stifle her independent nature and let Liam take the lead as they infiltrate
Austen’s circle via her favorite brother, Henry.

But diagnosing Jane’s fatal illness and obtaining an unpublished novel
hinted at in her letters pose enough of a challenge without the continuous
convolutions of living a lie. While her friendship with Jane deepens and her
relationship with Liam grows complicated, Rachel fights to reconcile the woman
she is with the proper lady nineteenth-century society expects her to be. As
their portal to the future prepares to close, Rachel and Liam struggle with
their directive to leave history intact and exactly as they found it…however
heartbreaking that may prove.

Praise for The Jane Austen Project

“What lover of literature hasn’t dreamed of going back in time to meet Jane
Austen? In her debut novel, Kathleen A. Flynn brings this dream to life,
creating a vivid portrait of Regency England in all its glory and squalor.
Flynn illuminates the stark contrasts between that era and our own, and
movingly depicts the heartbreak of those who might try to travel between the
two.”

— Lauren Belfer, author of And After the
Fire and A Fierce Radiance

“The Jane Austen Project is clever, captivating, and original.
I loved it and couldn’t put it down! It’s been a long time since I’ve been so
engrossed in a novel, or lost so much sleep reading it. Who wouldn’t want to
travel back in time and meet Jane Austen? Flynn’s depiction of Jane Austen is
wonderful, exactly as I imagine she must have been. The ending is a shocker and
one of the strengths of the novel. It presents a view of time travel—and
history—you won’t soon forget. A keeper on my Austen shelf.”

— Syrie James, author of Jane Austen’s First
Love

“I loved The Jane Austen Project. Brilliantly written and a
must-read for any Jane Austen fan!”

— Paula Byrne, author of The Real Jane
Austen

About Kathleen A. Flynn

Kathleen A. Flynn is an editor at the New York Times, where
she works at "The Upshot." She holds a B.A. from Barnard College and
an M.A. from the University of North Carolina. She has taught English in Hong
Kong, washed dishes on Nantucket, and is a life member of the Jane Austen Society
of North America. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their shy fox
terrier, Olive.

I've now read Curtis Sittenfeld's Eligible and Joanna Trollope's Sense and Sensibility, and feel that they've reduced Austen to "How to get a Man." Especially Trollop, just the same story with a Blackberry thrown in.

About Me

I've been an English teacher for a long time now and a blogger for more than 5 years. I love classic literature, reading, theatre, period drama, art and that is what I usually write about on FLY HIGH and My Jane Austen Book Club. I'd love to hear from you! Leave your comments to my posts or send e-mail messages to learnonline.mgs@gmail.com.